In January 2022, Jessica and I founded MintStars to combat the systemic discrimination and exploitation that adult content creators face on the very platforms they depend on to make a living.
With 12 years of experience in tech—including founding a previous startup—I had watched the rise of OnlyFans with interest, but I was very much an outsider to the space. In late 2021 some close personal friends of mine shared with me their experiences as adult content creators: battling deplatforming, dealing with high rates of chargebacks, delayed withdrawals and random, unfair censorship, all on platforms taking 20-60% of their earnings but doing nothing to protect or advocate for them. The more I heard, the more I realised how huge and widespread these issues were in the space - with most creators spreading their work across 10-20 different platforms in order to protect their livelihoods.
Wanting to learn more, I reached out to Jessica, who I had been introduced to through a mutual friend. With a background in law and a career focused on sex work policy, Jessica shared that she’d wanted to address these issues for a long time but without tech experience, didn’t know where to begin. Jessica explained to me that every issue I had referenced, high fees, unfair censorship, chargebacks, delayed payouts, all stem from Visa/Mastercard's openly anti-adult ToS and the platforms that use them prioritising their relationships with banking/payment partners, over their creators.
Neither of us were crypto advocates, but we saw an opportunity: by allowing users to seemlessly purchase crypto (without realizing it) and use it as credit on the platform, we could bypass the restrictive high-risk merchant categories imposed on adult content. More importantly, we could build a system that put creator safety, financial stability, and autonomy at its core.
MintStars launched in private beta, offering creators 100% payouts, unlimited, anytime withdrawals and 100% protection from chargebacks. Thanks to this differentiated proposition we quickly established a strong brand presence and creator following. However, we were having significant technical issues which restricted us from converting that creator loyalty into fan and revenue growth.
Having trialed ~40 different fiat-to-crypto on-ramps, we realised that crypto infrastructure was simply not where it needed to be for us to create a competitive fan experience with incumbent platforms like OnlyFans. We saw wallet top-up success rates of around 40%, subscriptions repeatedly failing and significant lags in the real-time movement of funds between fan and creator wallets. Alongside this, we were struggling to bring our engineering function in-house, having outsourced the original build to an agency.
~4,000 posts on the platform
~2,000 account holders
We changed tack and came up with an idea for a totally bespoke payment flow in partnership with a small payment facilitator, Coinflow, who believed in our team and business. We moved away from fiat-to-crypto on-ramps to a system where fans purchase a credit for USDC on a smart contract using traditional card network rails. This would allow us to maintain our payment differentiators while solving the issues with slow on-chain money movement, poor success rates and end-to-end subscriptions. The only issue was, this would require almost a full rebuild of the platform, which we estimated would take ~4 months, and at that point we had 4 months of runway left.
We made the difficult decision to replace our CTO with two full stack engineers who could expedite the build and made a bet that we would see enough immediate increase in fan and revenue growth to secure additional funding before runway ran out.
After 2.5 months, working 20 hour days, the platform revamp and Coinflow implementation was completed. We saw an instant jump in payment success rates and revenue going through the platform. With confidence in our payment system, we finally went out to the demand side of the market and saw an influx in fan activity in March. This growth was enough for us to complete a small bridge funding round at the end of Q1.
This period was undoubtedly the most difficult personally and professionally of my life (unfortunately the two are inextricably linked for me).
GMV
4,667 account holders
21,045 MAU
7,095 posts on platform
The corner was turned; revenue, fan numbers and posts on the platform all more than doubled. All of us were working flat out to be able to accommodate and keep pace with demand.
We made some crucial hires to allow us to continue to grow at pace, including a Head of Product, a Head of Support and Moderation and a Social Media and Content Lead. The efficiency and quality of our hiring over the course of 2024 has been arguably our biggest win - not only attracting top talent, beating out orgs such as Spotify, but retaining that talent too. As we have grown we have maintained a balance between technology and sex work industry expertise in the team (6/12 with backgrounds in the sex tech/sex work). Not only has this helped us continue to build trust and credibility amongst our creators, but it is essential when attempting to understand the nuances, culture and pitfalls of the space.
Around this time, we decided to double down on payments and consolidate our advantage there. It’s always been our opinion that the multitude of companies using Stripe or other non-sex work friendly payment processors have built their business on a house of cards which is destined to come crashing down. That hypothesis, coupled with the realisation that content platforms are losing revenue, dwell time and cross sales due to high take rate on tips, led to our decision to spin off our tipping tool into its own product, MintPay. The launch of MintPay, which allowed fans to send a tip without creating an account, or topping up a wallet, coupled with Stripe shutting down a number of competitors in the build up to their IPO, led to another surge in revenue growth:
GMV:
8,918 account holders
40,607 MAU
15,250 posts on platform
I’ve referred already to a few different big bets we made which were vindicated and which we took huge satisfaction from; however, not every big bet has come off. In Q3 we attempted, and came very close, to acquiring one of the businesses which had been affected by the Stripe crack down on NSFW vendors. This business was doing 100x our revenue but was in distress after losing their ability to accept any payments. Although we weren’t able to pull this one off, we are always looking for opportunities to be aggressive and disrupt the industry.
Elsewhere, the good times rolled in as growth started to take off. It’s a rare and special thing to be part of a consumer start-up that is experiencing viral, organic growth. We surpassed $1m annual run rate, 50,000 monthly unique visitors and 15,000 fan accounts. Creators enrolled in our referral program were averaging 4.1 creator referrals, and in her new role as head of advocacy, Jessica was propelling our brand through press coverage in the Financial Times, BBC Women’s Hour and CityAM.
We made significant procedural and operational improvements to the business in this period. We found strong banking and accounting partners - services other businesses take for granted but which we have had to struggle by without to date - cleared significant tech debt and added a third full stack engineer, significantly improving our shipping velocity.
GMV
15,693 account holders
80,000 MAU
30,182 posts on platform
We closed a small Seed funding round early in Q4, which was a significant milestone for the business. The raise gives us runway to profitability and was the product of a huge amount of time, energy and resilience. Although the tide is turning, there is still serious institutional bias against adult businesses. Watching businesses we have outperformed by multiple orders of magnitude get funded faster and at higher valuations only made the chip on my shoulder bigger.
Growth feels that much sweeter when you’re fuelled by a mission and a healthy dose of spite and, alongside the closing of our round, that is what Q4 delivered. Growth in absolute numbers continued to be incredibly strong:
GMV
100,000+ MAU
22,000 account holders
41,000 posts on platform
Additionally, cohort metrics demonstrate the ROI on platform improvements and product-led growth:
AOV: since the launch of the MintPay tipping tool, average order value has increased steadily, from $30 to $55 in the last two quarters
Fan retention: This has steadily increased throughout the year.
Feb/Mar 30 day retention:
(D1 - drop off is expected as this is for all platform visitors, not account holders)
D7 - 4%
D30 - 2%
Nov/Dec 30 day retention:
D7 - 16%
D30 - 10.5
Despite the 200x growth in 24’, there’s a strong sentiment amongst the team that this is really the tip of the iceberg. There are some huge monetization unlocks coming in 2025 which are sure to drive more money and fan traffic to creators on the platform. In the immediate term we will be releasing an updated and fully functional chat feature by the end of February with paywalled media, tipping, games and paid messaging options.
Longer term we are committed to continuing to innovate with some huge features on the roadmap. Without giving those away, our product thesis is to build a platform that facilitates deeper relationships between creators and their fans.Subscription platforms have given fans access to models and creators they have never-before been able to communicate with. However, there’s still a significant delta between how fans would like to interact with creators and how they’re currently able to. We want to add gamification and mobilise the fans who are the silent majority on platforms today.
